A television set-top box can receive video content, such as television programming and on-demand movies from a content distributor. The set-top box can then record the video content and/or process the video content for display on a display device, such as a television, LCD, or other type of video display device. A television set-top box can include a hard drive to record the television programming and other video content, and may be referred to as a “personal video recorder” (PVR) or a “digital video recorder” (DVR). With the advent of high-definition video, a traditional set-top box is limited to recording about one-quarter of the video content that it would have been able to record as standard-definition video because the video data for a high-definition program consumes approximately four- to five-times more storage space than the video data for the same program in a standard-definition format.
A single hard drive in a television set-top box has a limited capacity to store recorded video content. If a viewer wants to record additional video content, an external storage drive or hard drive may be connected to a television set-top box to expand the video content storage capacity. A traditional television set-top box can have expansion ports, such as for a USB, Ethernet, and/or an external serial ATA (SATA) connection. However, external drives can be unreliable and are implemented with protocols that may cause a system failure (e.g., “crash”) of a television set-top box, such as when an external drive is disconnected. For example, an internal hard drive of a television set-top box may be at capacity, which may then initiate the set-top box to write additional video content to an external drive to record the video content. In an event that the external drive is unplugged or disconnected when performing a write operation, however, the operating system of the television set-top box may fail or crash.